Depressing: Ray Bradbury Hates The World Today

Maybe I’m expecting too much of Ray Bradbury; he is, after all, about to turn 90 on August 22nd, and therefore can be allowed to be slightly uncertain about the way that the world today has turned out. But there’s really something dispiriting about the curmudgeonly portrait of the Farenheit 451 author from the LA Times, which includes the following quotes:

I think our country is in need of a revolution… There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

I was approached three times during the last year by Internet companies wanting to put my books [on electronic reading devices]. I said to Yahoo ‘Prick up your ears and go to hell.’

I’ll give him his complaint against Barack Obama (“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon… We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever.”), but everything else…? When did Bradbury become such… well, such an old man?

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drlinus

he’s always been an old man!!!

think about it: all of his books/short stories are about the dangers of technology and how they will lead to our gloomy, dehumanized future. i remember one short story of his where a man was arrested for taking a walk outside because the cops couldn’t possibly understand why he would rather take a stroll than watch television in the comforts of his home.

bradbury hates technology. or at least he hates what he perceives to be how humans handle technology. and he wants us to colonize mars? so we can spread our miserable, technologically bleak future to another planet?

great writer, but weird man.
jackypaper

@drlinus: To the contrary, Bradbury adores technology. He has been in love with rockets and robots since long before you and I were born. What he hates is human mindlessness, our giving up of ourselves to images flickering on a screen, our willingness to substitute real experience for surrogate adventure; why post on internet forums when by doing so we forget to walk next door and share a handshake with our neighbor? The short story you reference is based upon an actual event and has nothing to do with a hatred of television, but rather a love of life. His desire for Mars is the desire for humanity. Hopefully, he would suggest, we will find on those red rocks the key to unlock the door of our own humanness, because apparently we’ve misplaced it here on earth . . .
tereglith

I agree with him.

Not all technology is the same. Some technology (the aforementioned “rockets and robots”) allows us to actually become more human, celebrating the human spirit of adventure and exploration and innovation using the technology as a tool to increase our own humanity. And that’s great.

But a lot of other technology is simply a crutch or even a pillow. Turning our every thought into little flickering streams of binary (even as I am doing now) doesn’t increase our humanity, it degrades us into nothing more than a collection of data, and that is what he was rightfully afraid of when he was writing and what has happened today. There is no innovation or exploration in most gadgets, no increase in our humanity. “Hey, we made 4G!” “What is it?” “It’s barely improved 3G with a new name. But buy it anyway!” And that’s what a ‘major innovation’ in gadgetry is. It makes humanity more shallow, less human, brings us down to the gadgets level. We’ve got a stepladder here that we’ve decided to sit down on the ground and look at instead of using it to climb. Bradbury loves humanity as it truly is, and he loves technology that pushes humanity to new heights, but he is rightfully afraid of technology that pushes us down, and that is a distinction that needs to be made.

(Also, the story mentioned in the above comments is entitled “The Pedestrian”)